Sunday, July 21, 2013

Building Kaizen Teams


The first step in a Kaizen is not to just gather and get some improvement ideas, but to create an environment where everybody wants to contribute.

To sustain agile movement, it is efficient to create self-governing team to check on each other's progress. If you studied about Kaizen, this is really what it is all about it's about having self-governing teams to continuously improve instead.

I used to work for a company which had a top-down structure. They decided to do "Kaizen" but they had bosses tell their subordinate to think up of a way to do some improvements and gave them quota on number of ideas. They got their number of improvement ideas but nobody really was too excited about doing it.

What we are doing is forming a voluntary teams where each can share their ideas with other teams. The teams are meeting half a day each week to share what they have done, the problems they are currently facing, and what they plan to do. Others can provide better ideas.

I've often heard about respecting others. On a Kaizen team, it's not about respecting others but more of respecting human being with all the characteristics whether they be good or bad. Respecting someone tend to create a vertical relationship and that's to be avoided.

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